Religion

07 May 2009

“I would have built it out of rice crispie squares if it were appropriate.”

At Gray Hill Solutions, we don’t subscribe to one coding platform. To do so would be to lose any advances in software tools – which come at a wonderfully bewildering pace. It makes sense, then, to not specialize in the tools – but in the application of tools in general.

Society has finally caught up with Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was on a life-long quest to make the world a better place. That’s a big ticket item. It’s difficult to make the world a better place through myopia.

In his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (read, buy), Fuller gave a long and impassioned argument about the dangers of over specialization. He leads this argument with this passage:

Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist. Operating under the patronage of the Duke of Milan he designed the fortified defenses and weaponry as well as the tools of peaceful production. Many other great military powers had their comprehensive design scientist-artist inventors; Michelangelo was one of them.

Many persons wonder why we do not have such men today. It is a mistake to think we cannot. What happened at the time of Leonardo and Galileo was that mathematics was so improved by the advent of the zero that not only was much more scientific shipbuilding made possible but also much more reliable navigation. Immediately thereafter truly large-scale venturing on the world’s oceans commenced, and the strong sword-leader patrons as admirals put their Leonardos to work, first in designing their new and more powerful world-girdling ships. Next they took their Leonardos to sea with them as their seagoing Merlins to invent ever more powerful tools and strategies on a world-around basis to implement their great campaigns to best all the other great pirates, thereby enabling them to become masters of the world and of all its people and wealth. The required and scientifically designed secrecy of the sea operations thus pulled a curtain that hid the Leonardos from public view, popular ken, and recorded history. – Bucky Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

The shifts from Leonardos to Pirates and so on were enabled by advances in knowledge. Merely introducing the number 0 into the human brain created a massive revolution not only in technology and travel, but in how we relate to the nature of work and to each other. Fuller here was saying that we can all be geniuses in our own way – we just have to pull back the curtain.

To Fuller, the geniuses were not overly specialized. They could not be. In order to truly be creative, you need materials from which to create. Frans Johannson calls this “the Medici Effect”. The Medici Effect is, in essence, a mashup of ideas that can only come by stepping outside your field of expertise and learning from something radically different. Fishermen have something to teach Internists. Astronauts have something to teach pawn shop owners. You never know, because the nature of insight is that it creatively links ideas that may not seem linkable.

So we are now in a world where we are understanding the world faster than ever before. Digital technology so vastly speeds up the conversation that innovation and invention are common place. “What have you invented for me lately?”

We are now all da Vincis.

In order to be da Vincis, we must now embrace Fuller-style generalism. No one is better to examine than Fuller himself for this. Being a generalist didn’t mean Fuller was mired in reading random books. Fuller built housing and cars. He was an author and and artist. He was practical and theoretical.

Or we can look at Henry J. Kaiser (right). Kaiser oversaw shipyards, steel mills, automotive plants, engineering firms and a massive health care company. Dude was hardly stuck in one mode of thinking.

The fact is that today advances in systemic thinking are requiring more holistic visions. The human body was at one time a collection of fairly autonomous parts that functioned together. Now, the body is understood more as a system and medicine is reacting to this realization. But it doesn’t stop there, because the body reacts to lead in your paint, to particulates in the air, to the sun’s rays, to recycled air, to motor vehicles, to stress … Suddenly being a doctor is even more complicated than before.

Recently when I was in Hospital for pneumonia, the doctors asked me a lot of questions. An not-insignificant number were about stress. Did I own my own company? Was business going well? How was my life at home? Had I suffered a loss recently?

At that point, at least at that hospital, I knew medicine had turned a corner and that we were starting to embrace Fuller’s wisdom at last. Our understanding of the world and life is becoming more systemic and holistic. The advances of technology and the speed of culture are now so fast that expertise is seen as temporal and contextual. What is our expertise today will be obsolete technologically very soon – but the experience of learning and applying the technology is what is really important. The actions are ethereal, the lessons learned are permanent.

Now it’s up to us to let people know those lessons learned and to grow from them. That’s the new expertise. We are all experts, we are all generalists.

04 July 2008

Someone once asked me, "Sure, I get that there's a niche in the market, but is there a market in the niche?" Eight years ago, William Rowden and I started Gray Hill Solutions to create innovative software for the transportation management sector. In the end, we were about as successful as we could be.

So I'm going to tell this story based on my perception of this particular vertical. I believe the lessons here translate out to all verticals. Every vertical has blind spots, cultural issues, and built-in waste.

It seemed like Gray Hill couldn't miss. There is an entire industry called "Intelligent Transportation Systems" (ITS), but there are very few innovations in the product lines year to year. The industry was certainly large enough to support a niche player like Gray Hill.

The actual technologies of ITS at the time were lagging the rest of the tech community by about five years. That led to easy identification of high-value innovation (or at least technical application) for the industry.

Now, the industry lags behind by about 9 years and is only slipping further and further back. What is killing innovation in transportation? Why aren't obviously superior solutions being installed? Why do suppliers continue to make minor improvements on feature-poor products, rather than truly innovate?

16 March 2008

It must be a good 23 years since I played Dungeons and Dragons last, in John's gameroom in Grand Island, Nebraska.

Regardless of what one might wish to say about D&D geeks, they are a culture - and a very long standing one by modern measure. Practitioners of social media and social networking who aim to create on-line cultures and communities need look no further than Dungeons and Dragons to find all the elements necessary for strong community.

It is brilliant work. Complex, subtle, and utterly open ended.

We used to play D&D not only for hours, but for days. It was an incredible focal point for bored teens eager for both competition and intellectual challenge.

I can firmly see a huge table with the map and game objects, the players (Chad, Kurt, John, Chris, myself, and the cycling guests), the piles of food, the bean bag to let people crash when they couldn't go on. Marathon sessions that didn't cause carpel tunnel. That required face to face interaction.

All because E. Gary Gygax sat down and created some books.

It was the vital ingredients in D&D that allows it to be a sustainable community, not the game itself. The game is merely a game. It's construction and Gygax's forethought is what makes it sustainable.

Why is D&D so special in particular? What do we have to learn from it? Well, it has all the key ingredients to culture, here's just five of them:

1. Cooperation is Vital to Survival

In a D&D world, you can be a super powerful character that can run around kicking butt and taking names - for a while. But, unless you have a dungeon master that's scared of you, something more powerful will come and get you.

In a well balanced culture, people rely on each other for success. Every so often we may need a character like Willem Dafoe's Elias Grodin in Platoon, but they don't make a healthy culture overall. In fact, their uniqueness is what makes them valuable to the group.

Usually, you need to build a team of varying skill sets in order to succeed. You need visionaries, detail people, and workers. You need producers and consumers (see my previous post about LiveJournal). You need balance. You need cooperation.

When you need cooperation, you build virtuous cycles to success. Each person not only adding their strengths, but also relying on others to do the same. Surprisingly, people actually like to be relied upon. They don't like being forced to do things, but they love the freedom to do good.

Cooperation is a key ingredient of culture.

2. Positive Feedback and Reinforcement

Do good, get experience points. Get experience points, become more skilled. Become more skilled, do even more good!

Seem simple? Well, it is.

Surprising, there are so many VCs out there giving money to Social Networking sites that simply don't get it. They don't see why it's important.

And why should they? Only recently has business begun to even accept that basing performance on strengths and not weaknesses is a good idea. As a society, we're just beginning to grasp that positive reinforcement might be beneficial.

Gygax figured that out decades ago.

He made a game out of not getting your pudding before you eat your meat. He figured out that we want to do the work if the reward is right and that the reward not only makes us feel good, but it makes us appreciate the reward giver even more. In short, it earns loyalty.

Reinforcement is a key ingredient of culture.

Loyalty is a key ingredient of culture. (Bonus ingredient!)

3. Freedom of Choice

And Devo sang:

We're victims of sedition on an open seaNo one ever said that life was freeSink, swim, go down with the shipJust use your freedom of choice

In life we have a lot of choices and some of them are a real pain in the ass. No choices, however, is the very definition of tedium.

Creating an open ended environment where players were limited only by their imaginations - but still bound to a set of conventions - is truly masterful work. The conventions need to be firm enough to create a coherent environment, but open enough to allow the users to build whatever environment they choose.

This freedom isn't just important because people's minds like to wander, it's important because culture is not a fixed concept. Culture meanders through time. It morphs, reinvents itself, but still maintains an identity - if it is allowed to. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Let's copy and paste that sentence a few times. If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.If not, it simply dies and is replaced with something else.

Stupid VCs who want to fund something quick take note, the world of culture building is not quick and building on-line communities to flip will fail in the long run. Certainly you can build a bubble and steal make some money, but the tools will fail.

Gygax created a very detailed environment that let people go where they wanted and do what they wanted - within a given boundary. A good dungeon master, in the end, was someone who knew exactly when and how to apply rules. To keep the game interesting and fun, while being neither ungoverned nor oppressive.

Freedom is a key ingredient of culture.

4. Role Definition

We all wear many hats. But, damn, we love hats. When we don't have a hat, we're confused about what our roles are.

This is closely coupled with two other things: Fit and Style.

Don't give me a Cowboy hat.

The roles we choose need to fit our personality and our aesthetic. In business, people often wear all sorts of ill-fitting hats. Excellent producers who get promoted to managers, but hate managing people. Team members who get a role because it's needed, but doesn't fit their strengths. People fighting for a position for which they are ill-suited because society doesn't value what they do well.

Fit requires matching with your skill set, which requires definition. Your role must come with an explanation of what society thinks that role does. You will augment that within bounds based on your style, but the role itself needs some boundaries in order to recognizable as a role.

(You will see many posts by me for management theory, discussing why process changes at some companies fail because people are reassigned to roles that aren't adequately explained or incorporated into the culture.)

Style is how that role integrates with you. How are you going to be a good cost accountant or an elf mage? Do you want to be one at all? Does your style lead to success or failure? You can mold the position to fit your style, but you can't completely obliterate the rules for that role. You can't be a cost accountant that only bakes cookies, for example.

Gygax's D&D universe has a set of classes and subclasses of roles that are compelling enough to attract a wide variety of personality types and skill sets.

Roles are a key ingredient of culture.

5. Maturation Process

Can your community mature? In D&D you mature by the leveling up of your character, but after time this becomes the mechanical part of the game. Predictable, almost.

What starts as your primary motivation for playing the game, becomes merely a byproduct of it. After a while, maturation takes on some familiar roles.

Mentoring, specialization, and governance are primary indicators of a mature community. As characters and players mature, they lead other players forward and teach them the ropes (mentoring). They become more and more skilled and subtle in their areas of knowledge (specialization). And they tend to watch for malfeasance and, from their position of authority which comes from being a long-time member of the culture, deal with it (governance).

Again, we can see this in yesterday's LiveJournal article. Players of World of Warcraft will recognize these elements immediately. This process is a major factor in the success of Wikipedia.

This type of maturation reinforces culture by providing a healthy continuum of member growth and internal policing.

Cultural maturation is a key ingredient of culture.

Emotional Goodbye to Gary

You know, at the time of an experience you never know what lessons you will take away. It's certain that at 13 years of age I wasn't really all that concerned with the cultural maturation processes of D&D. I don't even know that Gygax was too concerned.

I do know that more than few funds were pooled to go to the Conestoga Mall in Grand Island and pick up yet another D&D book.

What I see now, as I work with clients to help build communities and collaborative management processes, is that Gygax understood tactics on a deeper level than any of us ever gave him credit for.

His company TSR (Tactical Studies Rules), which produced D&D, is keyed on tactics. We always thought it was battle tactics. It's pretty clear now that he understood social tactics as well.

Consider this: D&D was sold primarily from word of mouth in a pre-Internet era. (The lack of advertising scared parents who felt it was a pawn of the devil.) In other words, it was a highly successful viral marketing campaign in an era where there was tremendous friction for word of mouth.

Gygax, in the end, was a person who seemed ultimately interested in the game and the community around the game. He said in 2004:

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

In this one, compact sentence, is about half the essay above. Every person interested in creating community, whether a social media creator, an urban planner or whatever, should have this quote on their wall.

Gygax's game did more than keep me off the streets, it reinforced deep community values and contributed to many of my current management and social theories.

So, thank you for that Gary. I genuinely appreciate your thoughtful creations.

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else. - Gary Gygax

17 February 2008

The other night, a budding lawyer lamented that she needed to watch what she put on her MySpace page because future employers might see it. A few months ago, Sue Thomas told me she was sometimes taken aback by what people would type into Twitter - entries that could damage their reputation.

I've heard this a lot: there is a fear of transparency.

Historically, communication technologies (books, radio, television) have broken down barriers. Usually these were cultural barriers. Helping people of different groups interact, become more tolerant, and calm society.

But there are little truths about ourselves that may be damaging, may seem irrelevant that social media seems to rapidly be bringing to the forefront and dispelling as either damaging or irrelevant.

Two people meet and fall in love. They get married. Over time, they start to take each other for granted, fall into specific patterns of relating, and grow bored with each other. They have institutionalized their communication patterns which has, in effect, put the spark out.

Unbeknownst to either, these two people (this is a pre-Internet story) then start checking out the personal ads sections of the local paper. They don't know what they need, but they need more. Neither are really happy about it, but they need vital communication aren't getting in their marriage.

So one takes out an ad. He gets a great response. In the ad, he talks about all these great romantic notions. His respondent shares and amplifies those notions. She's so much more interesting than his wife, and she's only been in text!

And when they meet at the pub, husband and wife are face to face. They were both more interesting and relevant than they thought.

So the Rupert Holmes Paradox is: if you use one means of communicating with someone all the time, you end up not communicating at all.

Imagine if the husband and wife were on Facebook.

--

Rupert Holmes threw a Pina Colada at you!

--

Liza Holmes left a message on your wall:

I never knew you liked Pina Coladas! What do you think of walks in the rain?

--

This is true for many things. People have often tended to partition their lives. Their work persona, their home persona, their "not-in-front-of-the-kids" persona, their church persona.

Transparency through social media is wearing these boundaries away. Is that good or bad? No. It's both or neither. It's merely an outgrowth of this new communications technology.

In a very real way, social media and social networking are breaking down not external barriers for communication - but internal ones. And that's rather exciting to watch.

31 December 2007

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking. Rules, rules, rules. Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules. Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post. Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his. Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse. (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet. If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing. You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy. You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are. It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories. But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools. Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application. Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches. In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites. A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it. I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates. The cohort of friendliness is honesty. Every list talked about transparency in one form or another. Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical. The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two. You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services. You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld. You need to participate, you need to facilitate. You have to show up for your own party. Communities grow, so you need to nourish them. Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything. Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17. This post has links to the other additions.

06 December 2007

Through my business, I own a bunch of servers. Some of them run various flavors of Linux, some of them run various flavors of Windows. I don't own a Mac, yet, but likely will in about 6 months.

One of the rebroadcasts of my blog feed goes through the Beijing Linux User Group, with whom I am somewhat affiliated. (Hello, Bluggers!) Through them I received feedback that I was talking too much about Microsoft and not enough about Linux in my blog.

Which was funny because my cousin Robert was noting that I was too quick to criticize Microsoft.

But the Blugger's comments didn't care whether I criticized or loved Microsoft, merely that I was talking more about corporate (closed source) stuff and not so much about Open Source stuff.

My initial response was ... I write about social networking and social media. But that wasn't good enough.

When you look at the earlier period of this blog, I talked a lot about Open Source issues but I've largely stopped. Why? Because I seem to be more articulate about social media. But why not Open Source social media?

This made me take a look at what I'm using right now and why. I came to the conclusion that there is both a perceptual and an actual channel of openness in software. They look something like this:

Users value the freedom of mobility as very close to what coders value as the freedom of source code access. The only reason there is a real gap here is that closed source systems, like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., don't actually allow you freedom of movement. It merely feels like that because the application is free and, fiscally speaking, the barrier for entry or exit is zero.

Time investment is a very different story. Users spend a great deal of time setting up their social networks in the applications and don't want to lose that investment (whether or not it is a sunk cost). So the applications become sticky - even if they provide marginal value.

A major part of my writing has been to introduce more freedom of movement (an open source ideal) into the social networking sphere. But Freedom of movement is a very tricky concept here, with a lot more than just giving people access to their buddy lists. So many posts delve into how people relate, how we might use existing applications and where the shortfalls are.

Not knowing these things will make future improvements to social application development meaningless.

09 May 2007

A while ago Ed Vielmetti, yeah- the walking guy, grabbed a bunch of questions from 103 Bees and answered them in his blog. See, 103 Bees mines your blog's search-hit history and analyzes it in various ways. One of those ways is to give you a list of direct questions people have asked and, for whatever reason, Google (usually) has directed them to you. Also, usually these questions are no where and in no way answered in your blog.

Many times these questions are outright insanity and you stare at the results trying to figure out how they made it to your blog in the first place. But, nonetheless, through the great mystery that is "relevance" there they are. Unrelated questions driving traffic to your site.

I thought Ed's use of the questions would be a great way to get rid of writer's block. Well, today I'm working from home. My back patio is lined with spring plants waiting to make it to the ground or into containers and I have writer's block.

So I'm going to take a few questions from my list from 103 Bees and answer them for real. Yes, these are real questions real people asked a search engine and somehow found their way to Jim Benson's blog.

Question 1: How do I get oblivion without using a torrent?

I am assuming anyone who would ask this question does not actually want to buy the game Oblivion at full retail, and is not asking how to obtain actual oblivion. Lucky for you, the Internet includes eBay, a quick search gives you Oblivion on three platforms (XBox 360, PS3 and PC). The lowest price here is a penny. I think you can suck it up and pay a penny for something you really want.

Question 2: How do I draw a couch {facing forward}?

A lot easier than you would facing backward. But if you were looking for a how-to... First, draw a rectangle that is about 4 times as long as it is high. Now on either end at the bottom draw a little square (make sure they are both the same size). Now on top of that box on either side draw an upright rectangle that's about twice as high as it is wide and is about the same height at the original rectangle. Now, at the top rectangle to the left draw a line going up a little bit, now make another line going up that same amount from the far side of the of the right rectangle. Now join those two rectangles. If you did that right it looks like a couch. If you did that wrong, I suggest you look directly at the front of a couch.

Question 3: 48 laws of power how to read?

I'm including this question because I actually see it fairly often. I wrote a pretty crummy review of the book and left it at that, but many people have come to the site with searches like this. How do I read the book? I'm scared of the book? Does the book corrupt people? Is the book accurate?

The 48 Laws of Power is an historical look back on how people of immense power obtained and lost that power. The overarching principles of how to influence, manipulate, and hoard in the quest of power. I've had people tell me that they would not read the book, lest some of those lessons actually rub off on them and they would become bad people.

In my opinion, it's a great book and I've used lessons in it to actually avoid falling into the same traps as those who have allowed others to be manipulated. Ultimately, though, understanding "bad" is a primary key of becoming "good".

We can see many people in the world of "good", from Jerry Falwell to Bill Clinton, who have pontificated "good" and did "bad" and were honestly surprised by it.

The 48 Laws of Power aren't all "bad", however, many can be mustered in the true service of "good". Much like drinking, many of the 48 laws are helpful in moderation, harmful in over-indulgence.

As for "How to read?" I would say that the 48 Laws of Power is not a how-to manual, but a book of lessons. The are delivered in as amoral a manner as possible and it is up to you to fill in the moral lessons.

Be your own Gandhi.

Question 4: What should be the conclusion of Ubik?

Philip K. Dick's Ubik is also a major search engine hit for me. Ubik is a story of pattern matching and the bewildering nature of misinterpretation. Some of the characters in the book are dead. We're not sure which ones or how dead they actually are. A mysterious substance called Ubik may provide relief from this state. But what is Ubik?

PKD uses all sorts of vehicles to foist Ubik upon the characters and the reader. Some people know about it, sometimes it's a snack, sometimes it's a cleaning solution.

Written in 1969, Ubik also is fully aware of Marshall McLuhan and the saturation of push-advertising. Each chapter starts with a gratuitous advertisement for Ubik - each time Ubik is performing an entirely different miracle solution to common problems.

Ubik, in the end, is about corporate control. Over our choices, over our flows of information, and ultimately over how dead we can actually get.

Or at least that's my conclusion, anyway.

Question 5: How many people have read being and nothingness?

Millions of people have read Being and Nothingness of their own free will.

12 April 2007

When we talk about community, we can not avoid talking about influence. Communities of practice, communities of faith, communities of family, communities of thought - all exchange influence. Influence has many negative connotations, but has many positive ones as well.

When I think of the African quote "It takes a village to raise a child," I think about my nephews and about young Spencer Thompson who are quite blessed to have cohesive villages in which to grow and mature.

Villages, provide a gentle influence and usually a social framework that people usually benefit from, rebel against and then later adopt an outright grudging appreciation for. It seems there's also a difference between people who are your influences and people who raise you. Where raising is done by people who give you both an ethical bedrock and boulders of massive epiphany.

And I look back and wonder who, precisely, raised me? Who went beyond influence to providing both life lessons and a wealth of a-ha moments? Who helped me realize my successes and interpret my failures?

To list my influences would take days or months. To do them justice in describing their impacts would take years.

But I'm going to give a shot at listing who raised me because Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night and he's one of those people.

One quick caveat: I am intentionally leaving out five guys I grew up with because my relationship with them seems intrinsically different. When I figure out why, I'll write about that too.

So, let's explore this a bit:

Irma and Emmet - My paternal grandparents were so Nebraskan they were specifically named to fit the bill. I spent a lot of time with them in the late 60s and early 70s. I would travel out to Scottsbluff, Nebraska (which is quite a hike from Omaha) and we would either spend the summer there or out in the mountains of Wyoming. You really couldn't describe my grandparents any other way than decent.

I have always had a temper that I won in the genetic lottery from my mother's side of the family. I've also often tried to mellow those explosions with memories of my grandfather - whom I have no recollection of ever exploding. My grandmother was a meddler, and I also have a bit of that.

But more than anything, I've found my grandparents to have left this earth with good will. And somehow, even as a little kid, that had an impact on me. Even when I was a self-destructive crazed teenager - I always tried to be a nice self-destructive crazed teenager.

My Parents - I have written about this before, but grew up on a remarkably stable family ship that sailed on a sea of economic uncertainty. While Reagan was telling us "Trust but Verify" we were learning that first hand. For several years we were severely impacted by people who overpromised and under delivered, who honestly didn't know their own limitations, who were lied to in other parts of the business chain, people who were seriously petty, and a few genuine assholes.

Through all of this, my parents did their best to make the best of what we had when we had it. It's easy for everyone in the family to Monday Morning Quarterback what happened between 1975 and 1985 - but it's also immaterial. We didn't lick our wounds then, there's no reason to do so now.

What came out of that was a strong family connection that persists today, a respect for life's unexpected drama, a drive to succeed, and a commitment to make sure that home is healthy.

Kurt Vonnegut - What the hell is Kurt Vonnegut doing here? He'd be the first to ask.

I first read Slaughterhouse Five when I was 13 years old. There is a scene where Billy Pilgrim is in Dresden right after the firebombing. The Nazis have brought out his POW squad to help clean up after the massacre. Of course, Dresden is in ruins. The POWs are warned not to loot the city and any looting will be met with immediate execution.

The Nazis were not in a good mood.

One of Billy's friends, finds - in the midst of all that destruction - a single porcelain figurine. Intact and beautiful. Out of all the destruction, beauty persists.

He picks it up and presents it as a gift to the Nazi officer in charge of his detail. The Nazi takes it, tells him he's a looter, and has him shot.

It was a scene so poignant and so powerful it penetrated even my sheltered Nebraskan 13 year old brain.

I have read almost everything that Kurt Vonnegut has written. Probably 95%. I have a whole shelf of his works. There was sort of a hand - off from Emmet and Irma to Vonnegut. My grandfather passed away in 1975 and by the time I was 14, my Grandmother was too old to deal with either me or my pubescent moodiness.

Kurt Vonnegut's books took me to weird places with bizarre characters that most people can't see past. But underneath that superficial layer lay a respect for his characters and their situations that was unique. I can list other writers who have healthy respect for their characters (Richard Russo, Orson Scott Card, Dostoyevsky) but never like Vonnegut.

As his books progressed along with him through time they became longer and more calm. His characters were always very flawed, loaded with regrets, and almost always found acceptance, forgiveness or redemption - not because everyone loves a happy ending - but because that's just how life is. You can either forgive or be bitter.

At the time I discovered Vonnegut, I was straying from the Catholic church. The mass of contradiction and hypocrisy I saw in the users of organized religion didn't work for me. But when reading the Bible, I found concepts of value. I began to see that the religions themselves had no real product other than community - but those communities didn't have room for the questions I was asking or my personal sensibilities.

I was still American though, and religion had trademarked concepts like respect and forgiveness. This made me bitter and angry. It seemed like there was no place for those concepts outside of the church.

Reading Vonnegut gave me epiphany after epiphany. Forgiveness isn't external. Respect is a fundamental human need. Bad people exist. Bad people are people. Self-respect can be drained by outside forces. Culture is a product I help create. I am responsible for myself. I am responsible for my culture. Communication is vital. Social Structures naturally corrupt. The results of your actions can be more powerful than your initial action. We are here on earth a short time and beauty is the only reward we get.

So, suffice it to say, I was partially raised by Kurt Vonnegut.

Paul Simon - At six years old, I had a little record-killer recordplayer. It was plastic and huge by today's standards. In 1971 it was considered small. I had three albums. The Limelighters "Meeting Here Tonight", A Kingston Trio LP, and Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends". Soon, I had every Simon and Garfunkel album. I could sing every song.

I'd end up at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha with my school and be singing "Monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere and the elephants are kindly but their dummmmmmb."

I also remember lying in my bedroom at night thinking about the songs I was listening to. And ever since then, Paul Simon has been excellent at releasing albums with lines that just nail me. He exposes my fears, points out my weaknesses, and weaves them along with other songs that speak of beauty and human nature. My fears, weaknesses, and the beauty of the world are one.

Lyrics I can quote from an airplane between LA and Seattle:

"seasons change with the scenery, weaving time like a tapestry, won't you stop and remember me?"

"sometimes even music can't substitute for tears"

"when you believe that your are lost love will find you"

"I long to see St. Judy's comet sparkle in your eyes when you awake"

"and what do you think they had hidden away in the cabinet cold of their hearts?"

"maybe these emotions are as near to love as love will ever be…"

"I was wrong and I could be wrong again."

While I was visible punk rocker, you could still find amongst my Dead Kennedys and Gang of Four tapes an offering or two from Paul Simon.

Ann Miner - Have you ever had a successful relationship end? Well, it's possible. I think I'm only mildly overstating (she'll disagree) when I say that about every word you are reading is largely due to Ann Miner, someone I broke up with 16 years ago.

While we have a nice groundwork here for me to be a wonderful human being, I must note that from 1982 to 1985, I was really really angry. I was a bubbling pit of teenage angst. One day my friend Corey yelled at me, "What is your deal? Since grade school you've been the happiest guy I know. Now you're angry all the time? It's pissing me off!" One day my friend Dave noticed I was angry and put on Ackee 1-2-3 by The English Beat which is a song designed to make people in comas smile. I wouldn't smile.

For 30 or so months I was angry. To the point that I forgot how to be anything other than angry.

When I went to college I was still angry and wasn't doing very well. Then Ann came along. Initially she was an abstract concept. "love interest". Suddenly being angry wasn't interesting any more.

I was totally smitten and needed to get straight A's in order to transfer to Michigan State to be with her.

Then we started living together. She taught me how to study. And at that time I really started writing. I was writing for her. I had a zine and published my work and sent it all over the planet. But I was writing for her. Fiction for her, autobiography for her, rants about politics for her.

She'd read it, compliment it, edit it, and give it back. That dynamic, with help and with positive reinforcement, improved my writing, my communication, and my appreciation for what I was capable of.

We had a totally consuming relationship that ended up consuming us before either of us were ready. Sometimes it became quite traumatic. But during that I learned to communicate with another person I cared about, to compromise, that you really don't always get what you want - but often do get what you need, and that people in conflict are … in conflict (handle with care!).

Conclusion

So this piece was (obviously) written because of Vonnegut's passing. I hope that in some way it gives him the respect that he deserves. I could write a literary review - but wanted it more personal than that.

Vonnegut always had an oblique method of storytelling. He'd go left to tell you about right. Shallow to tell you about deep.

I'm telling you about Vonnegut by telling you about me. I am respecting him by respecting others.

11 November 2006

I just finished a book of writings and teachings of the Dalai Lama. It's not something you should or can read in an environment filled with distraction.

One night I sat up in my studio reading in the quiet of the evening. I thought as deeply as I can about what he was saying and thinking about how to incorporate his teachings into my life. After a few hours of this, I was feeling very centered and peaceful.

I descended the stairs to the bedroom level of the house and was immediately confronted by the television my wife was watching. At many decibels, I was confronted by a Pillsbury Doughboy mindlessly dancing to a Shirley Temple song.

That derailed me.

Derailing is a violent act that grips your brain and pulls it from one track or focus of your choosing and shoves it onto one of someone else's choosing. The juxtaposition, the volume, and the sheer inanity of the message derailed me.

Sometimes derailing can be good. Babies focused on one thing they cannot have will tantrum, parents will then derail the baby by shaking a rattle or calling their attention to something else. Teachers noticing their students wafting off into their own thoughts will pull them back into focus.

I had the opportunity at IDEA 2006 to see Linda Stone's most recent rev of her Continuous Partial Attention speech. One of her key elements is to not use any visual aids which, in theory, means people will only focus on the words.

Her key point is that, in an effort to keep abreast of all possible opportunities, we don't focus on one item exclusively for very long, if at all. This is, in effect, our derailing of ourselves.

My old dog Cookie loved to eat. As kids we'd throw her food and she'd catch it and eat it. One night I had great fun tossing her a Cocoa Puff and she would catch it and eat it. Then I'd throw a whole handful of Cocoa Puffs and she'd try to catch them all and not catch anything. Her eyes would get big, her mouth would be open and she'd sort of have a fit trying to figure out how to catch them all.

There were so many opportunities of equal value coming at her so fast, she never completed the decision making process before all the opportunities were gone. If she'd focused on one Cocoa Puff, she'd have been fine.

It was really funny to watch.

It was pretty mean.

It derailed her.

In the case of the teacher or parent, derailing is a compassionate act aimed to help achieve proper focus.

In the case of my run-in with the Shirley Temple loving Doughboy, that derailing was entirely external and erased the focus I had achieved.

Under Continuous Partial Attention, people are so distracted by the choices they've given themselves, they never get that focus to begin with.

It is nearly impossible for us to control our environment these days. We'll always have e-mails or phone calls or Metrosexual Pop'n'Fresh Doughboys at 110 db. Linda's point is that we need to consciously choose the level to which we will allow ourselves to be distracted.

Without focus, we are always in a reactive mode. Pillsbury wants me always in a reactive mode. Too frenzied to make my own bread or to buy it fresh. To spazzed about Cocoa Puffs to think straight.

Without choices, we limit our potential growth. We will not actualize. We will stagnate.

In that book, the Dalai Lama said:

Our mind, as it is now, is completely scattered to external objects, due to which it is powerless. Our thought is like water running in every direction. But just as water, when channelized, becomes powerful, so it is with our minds.

12 September 2006

Reviewing The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Normally I have a one sentence, one paragraph, one page review. But this one wants to be more free-form.

The 48 Laws of Power details 48 individual laws of coercive power. How to obtain it, how to hold it, how to avoid being hurt by it. The overarching rule of power - that it corrupts - is never directly mentioned but is apparent. Greene provides amazing examples of history's masters of power. Napoleon, Catherine, Qin, etc.

One seriously can't stop reading this book.

But, for me, it caused a sort of recursive introspection that haunted me for days. I was constantly thinking of past events. What the power dynamics were. What I did wrong. Who was the victor. What the lasting damage was. What could be written off.

That's exhausting!

The good news is that, historically, I've done pretty well. When I was impertinent, I was not beheaded. When I was overeager, I was not exiled. I have not been imprisoned or had my wax wings burned. I haven't been drug through the streets or forced to live as a slave.

But I have overly applied power when I've had it, been burned by others when they've weilded theirs, and not played political games with skill and cunning. I have lost friends and overly rewarded those who wished me ill. I have been slow to identify malice.